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Track Premiere: Bobby Rush “Ride in My Automobile”

Presumably you are getting ready for the Record Store Day Black Friday event at the end of this week, so you will have no excuse not to consider also picking up the 4-CD career retrospective Chicken Heads: A 50-Year History of Bobby Rush (Omnivore). That would be by blues/soul/funk/disco/R&B legend Bobby Rush, of course, and this would be Friday, Nov. 27. Now, the BLURT braintrust has long been fans of Rush—ask us sometimes about all the vinyl we’ve got down in the basement—so the fact that we get to unveil a special track from the collection comes a particular treat. Check out “Ride in My Automobile”:

Rush himself comments on the track:

How that song came by is from when I was a teenager riding in a car and especially a convertible. My daddy had a new car. Once a week my daddy would let me drive the car to church or school. If you have a car you had all the girls. Let me ride in your automobile. I reversed it though…I wasn’t talking about a car; this girl was a fine girl she had fine legs and I really wanted to make love to her. I found out she had too many boyfriends. After I talked to her I said “I can’t date you girl, because you have too many boyfriends. You have a cute little car and it looks good, but you have too many men, one for each day of the week.” It means you have too many men, I’m not looking for a one night affair, I’m looking for a girl to be my own.

They would say “Bobby Rush I want to go with you.” I’d say “Baby I can’t ride in your automobile. You have a nice frame, but you have too many drivers at your wheel. You have a man in the daytime and a man at night, with that many men driving your car that just won’t treat it right.” In other words, it’s tight today but pretty soon it’s going to be loose.”

As co-producer and longtime Rush publicist Cary Baker adds, “The song was released 40-some-odd years ago. But you’d have to have the original—scratchy—45 RPM to own it. So this is a digital premiere.”

The box is an embarrassment of Rush riches, four discs and 78 tracks’ worth of musicality that’d blow the socks off even a seasoned Rush collector. The booklet itself is a piece of art, crammed with rare photos, priceless reproductions of record sleeve art and, in addition to music historian Bill Dahl’s extensive liner notes, testimonials from the like of Mavis Staple, Elvin Bishop, Leon Huff, Denise LaSalle and Al Bell.

Rush, quoted in the liners, summarizes his long, illustrious career thusly: “I cut a record and hope you like it. It don’t have anything to do with a white audience or a black audience. I just do what I know to do, and that’s all I know to do.”

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